Hello Grandma, Can you hear me?

I remember the Friday night you left.

There was a phone call to my dad, and nobody wanted to say anything to my mom so they lied, emergency they said but I already knew. I cried the whole night.

The next morning, my mum called to tell me. I spent hours in denial, pretending I didn’t believe it. I ate. I watched YouTube. I laughed at things that weren’t funny. There was even some stupid boy in the picture then, and for a few hours, I let the day move like nothing had happened.

By 4 p.m., on the staircase in our house, it finally caught up with me, my uncle posted a picture of you, so frail and tired, I didn't know who that person was.

I curled into a ball and started shaking. I cried in a way that felt like my body didn’t belong to me anymore. The only thought repeating in my head was simple and impossible: I was never going to see you again.

I cried so much my eyes swelled almost shut. When my mum came home and I saw her, I started crying all over again.

After that, there was a numbness that settled somewhere deep inside me.

And for a moment — a moment I’m almost ashamed to admit — the grief was so heavy that I thought about following you too.

Last year I wrote an essay called Grief Is a House. In it, I asked a question I didn’t know how to answer then: what happens to all the love we still have for someone who is gone?

Well…

The love I have for you lives in the stories I tell about you.

Do you remember when we were babies? You used to feed my sister and me amala with your hands. Instead of saying “here comes the aeroplane,” you would sing kamu kamu, kamu ololo, lifting each bite up to our mouths like a small ceremony.

Your old lantern would be on, the kerosine scent light in the air, its light reflecting gold on our faces and yours, and I remember looking at you and thinking you were magical.

You were.

You always have been.

Do you remember?

You’d put tiro in our eyes and soak us in shea butter so our skin would glow.

How about when we came for the holidays, and you took us everywhere with you, telling everyone we were your babies with that big smile on your face?

I loved being your baby, Grandma. I never stopped being your baby — not even when I was nine, and you were still feeding me amala by hand.

Do you remember?

Do you remember when I was ten, and I told you I wanted to be a lawyer?

You laughed and said, “Grandma Barrister!” and we laughed too, so hard we couldn’t stop.

Do you remember how, every year since I could talk, you’d call me on my birthday to sing my praises — “Omo ọba tẹ, Ọmọ oyè, Ọmọ oyè mo sìn” — and then pray for me like I was going into battle?

I waited for your call this year.

It never came.

Do you remember how, whenever you came to visit, you would clean and move through every nook and cranny with a prep in your step, the radio playing in the background?

You moved with such grace, like a woman who romanticized the ordinary. I guess my mum and I learned that from you. We still bond over our shared love for music… maybe not cleaning — you know I’m lazy.

I only started eating amala months after you left. It’s ironic, since I never liked it until you made me eat it. I don’t know exactly what that means, but it feels symbolic somehow — like a small piece of you lives in the things I do now.

I could go on and on about the beautiful life you lived. You weren’t perfect — far from it — but you were magical, and your wonder lives with us, now and forever.

I tell everyone who's willing to listen about you, mummy and I don't stop reminiscing, you're not just a memory to us, you're a presence.

You were magic in the small things: the meals, the songs, the prayers, the way you made ordinary days feel like holidays. The love you gave us — so full, so alive — is still here. It lives in my memory, in these stories, in the way I carry you with me.

I wonder if you can hear me.

I wonder if you know that the love I have for you didn’t disappear when you did. It only grew heavier, fuller, and somehow, it still finds ways to reach you.

So…

Maybe grief is a house. Maybe grief is a feeling that stays with us like a tumor, one that we'll fight occasionally, maybe the feeling will sit heavier on some days than others. But I’ll grieve for you regardless. Whether it makes me laugh till my stomach hurts or cry till my eyes swell shut, I won’t fight it. I will sit with the grief as long as it means I get to sit with you.

At the end of the day, grief is all the love we have with no place to go.

Kamu kamu, shey e n gbò mì?